Staff Recommendations

A listing of current favorites, recommended by the bookstore staff. Check back for new recommendations each month as we bring you the best of what we're reading. Browse by title, author or staff member!



  Anah
  |  Andy
  |  Dia
  |  Don
  |  Elaine
  |  Elaine Kahn
  |  Garrett
  |  Gent
  |  Jeff
  |  Jolene
  |  Layla
  |  Linda
  |  Lawrence
  |  Maia
  |  Matt
  |  Nancy
  |  Paul
  |  Peter
  |  Scott
  |  Stacey
  |  Tân

   
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The Infinite Tides
Christian Kiefer
An impressive debut novel from NorCal poet, songwriter and recording artist Kiefer, full of achingly beautiful passages on loss and regret, yet leavened with self-aware humor and with wonderment at the banality of contemporary suburbia.
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Southern Cross the Dog
A Novel
Bill Cheng
In the tradition of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O'Connor, Bill Cheng’s Southern Cross the Dog is an epic literary debut in which the bonds between three childhood friends are upended by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. In its aftermath, one young...
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Capital
A Novel
John Lanchester
From the best-selling author of The Debt to Pleasure, a sweeping social novel set at the height of the financial crisis. Celebrated novelist John Lanchester ("an elegant and wonderfully witty writer"—New York Times) returns with an epic novel that...
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Arming Mother Nature
The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism
Jacob Darwin Hamblin
As a Cold War aggressor, the United States, along with its allies, needed to maintain parity, or better yet attain superiority, in ecological warfare. This fascinating book explores how this perceived "unconventional warfare gap" was one of the main...
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Astragal
A Novel
Albertine Sarrazin
As if the reader were riding shotgun, this intensely vivid novel captures a life on the lam. "L'astragale" is the French word for the ankle bone Albertine Sarrazin's heroine Anne breaks as she leaps from her jail cell to freedom....
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The Democracy Project
A History, a Crisis, a Movement
David Graeber
The Democracy Project is an interesting dialogue with Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right, McKenzie Wark's A Hacker Manifesto and Eric Hobsbawm's How to Change the World. —Recommended by Paul, City Lights Books
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Wild
From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Cheryl Strayed
We loved this book for many reasons. Cheryl Strayed is smart, introspective, bad-ass, and loves books. She proves to her readers that it's often only in hindsight that we take the time to carefully reflect on our lives, finally seeing the trail through...
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The Watch
A Novel
Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya
Following a desperate night-long battle, a group of beleaguered soldiers in an isolated base in Kandahar are faced with a lone woman demanding the return of her brother's body. Is she a spy, a black widow, a lunatic, or is she what she claims to be...
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How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
A Novel
Mohsin Hamid
His first two novels established Mohsin Hamid as a radically inventive storyteller with his finger on the world's pulse. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia meets that reputation—and exceeds it. The astonishing and riveting tale of a man's journey...
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Ghana Must Go
A Novel
Taiye Selasi
Courageously and with great tenderness the people in this book are allowed rather than exposed. We get to know the sparkling fissures of where they have been broken, the beauty of their longing, and the tremendous strength of their love...
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The Bridegroom Was a Dog
A Novel
Yoko Tawada
There is a surreal bawdiness that gives this strange little story the feel of an erotic folk tale. It's easy to get lost in the playful and mischievous world that Tawada develops. —Recommended by Tân, City lights Books
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Middle C
William H. Gass
This is the first novel I have read from Gass and it far exceeded any expectations I had of this highly acclaimed writer. Middle C is an intense exploration of identity told through the life story of Joseph Skizzen, an amateur pianist and music...
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The Long Road to Antietam
How the Civil War Became a Revolution
Richard Slotkin
Recommended by Paul, City Lights Books
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Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
"…the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other." I think this book should be handed out to high school students along with free condoms and pamphlets on road safety. I think this book should be handed out...

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